Russian cyberspies access target by compromising neighbors

Infosec In Brief So-hot-right-now AI assistant OpenClaw, which is very much not secure right now, has teamed up with security scanning service VirusTotal. The tie-up means “skills” in the ClawHub – custom plugins for the OpenClaw assistant – will be scanned by over 70 antivirus scanners and URL/domain blocklisting services. “OpenClaw skills are powerful. They extend what your AI agent can do—from controlling smart home devices to managing finances to automating workflows. But with that power comes risk,” the assistant’s developers wrote in a Saturday post that explains the decision to work with VirusTotal. The post points out that working with the scanning service won’t totally secure OpenClaw. “Let’s be clear: this is not a silver bullet,” the developers wrote. “VirusTotal scanning won’t catch everything. A skill that uses natural language to instruct an agent to do something malicious won’t trigger a virus signature. A carefully crafted prompt injection payload won’t show up in a threat database.” Fallout from the Salt Typhoon hack of leading American telcos continues, and one US Senator isn't convinced that victim companies are being honest. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, last week sent a letter to her Republican counterpart demanding the CEOs of AT&T and Verizon appear before the group to explain why they keep withholding security assessments performed in the wake of 2024 revelations of w...